


fireflies in the garden

by mrspollifax



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Found Family, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 14:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17705930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrspollifax/pseuds/mrspollifax
Summary: I notice before Snow does. (I mean, of course I do. He’s oblivious, and I’m me.) A thin wisp of scent, of that green smoke that wasSimonall those years when he’d been the desire of my heart and the bane of my existence.-or-Simon gets his magic back. Nobody's completely over all that trauma from before.





	fireflies in the garden

**Author's Note:**

> First fic I have finished in over FOUR YEARS zomg. Yay!

I notice before Snow does.

(I mean, of course I do. He’s oblivious, and I’m me.)

A thin wisp of scent, of that green smoke that was _Simon_ all those years when he’d been the desire of my heart and the bane of my existence.

(He’s still both.)

He’s lying on the sofa. He’s sleeping, sociology textbook fallen onto his stomach. I stand inside the door of the flat and watch his chest rise and fall, his slow breaths draw in and out.

There’s no crack of electricity with it now, no overcharge that repels and draws in at the same time. Just the smoke.

Just Simon.

What in Merlin’s name does that mean?

\--

I don’t tell him right away.

I’m not sure how to tell him, when he goes blithely about heating water in his kettle and warming leftovers in the microwave, at peace with the mundanity of his everyday life after more than a year’s effort and study.

A day passes. Then two. Bunce doesn’t notice anything. She comes and goes and curls next to him on the sofa to read her letters from America. She has no idea that reality’s shifted a bit to the side.

Living human senses really are useless. (I’d rather she’d noticed.)

I remember standing with him under the moonlight in Hampshire, hearing my stepmother’s shouts and trying to conjure up a way out. I remember the look on his face in Professor Bunce’s study when I showed him what the Humdrum really was. I remember persuading him time and again that the gaping hole inside him didn’t matter to me, not the way he feared.

I don’t want to be the one to push him off balance again.

And I still don’t know what it means.

\--

“We should go back to Madame Tussauds,” Simon says. He’s staring at his phone reading Crowley-knows-what terrible guide to London he’s onto this week.

“No, Simon,” Bunce calls from the other room. “Anyway, you picked last time.”

He tips his head onto the back of the sofa, looking over at the kitchen door. “Do you have a better idea?”

“Not yet,” she replies, sticking her head out to glare at him, “but not that.”

“Why not?”

I sigh and fail to resist the temptation to roll my eyes. (I don’t resist very hard.) We have some variation of this conversation nearly every week. It ought to drive me straight into a biting rage. A couple of years ago, it unquestionably would have.

Now, it’s become a weirdly comforting ritual.

I’d call down fire on all of our heads before I admitted it out loud, but we’ve turned into a makeshift family of sorts, Snow and Bunce and I. It’s not something lovey-dovey. (Bunce and Snow are a bit lovey-dovey.) (But I am definitely not.) We’re a little bit odd, and we’re a _lot_ fucked up. And there aren’t many people who properly understand that.

On an average day, you can’t really tell. We attend lectures. We read. We revise. Bunce texts with Micah half the day. I dodge phone calls from my parents at night. At the weekend, Bunce herds us into art galleries and antiquarian bookshops; Snow drags us to the Eye or to Greenwich Market or to bloody Buckingham Palace. Occasionally I make them stand around bored while I go looking for new sheet music for my violin.

Bunce and Snow giggle, with sun in their eyes or rain on their hair. Sometimes even _I_ laugh.

But to this day I feel cold sweat on my neck in tiny, dark rooms. Bunce’s pulse ricochets at the sight of broken glass. And Simon … well. Some days he just closes up shop, so to speak. Sits quiet and still, gone Merlin knows where deep inside his mind.

And those are just the obvious wounds.

“It’s tacky,” I protest, “and overrun with tourists.”

“That’s the point,” Simon replies, undaunted.

“It’s also extremely creepy.”

He shrugs. “So are you. You don’t see us complaining, do you?”

So yeah, we’re fucked up. But we get by.

\--

I try to work out how to tell him. To plan it out. So of course when it happens, it’s a complete accident.

We’re sitting on the couch. I’m reading and trying to remember why Political and Legal Anthropology ever sounded like an interesting class. Simon’s legs are heavy in my lap, and I’m hunched over, my book resting on top of them. My hair is hanging in my face, refusing to stay put when I tuck it back behind my ears, and it’s driving me insane.

The way Snow keeps leaning forward and petting my head has nothing to do with that, obviously.

I grunt in irritation as I shove his hand away for the thousandth time. I set my book aside, gather my hair together at the back of my head, and start searching my pockets for a hair band.

Predictably, there’s none to be found. Simon’s smirking at me from the other end of the couch. My bag’s at the other end of the room.

“Get off,” I say.

“No.”

“Snow.”

He grins.

I’m trapped on the couch, holding my hair in one hand. It’s undignified, and he knows it. I glare at him.

He sticks his tongue out at me.

“You’re a child,” I say in response.

“You’re vain,” he tosses back.

“Let me up.”

“Hmm. No.”  

I poke at the sole of his foot with the fingers of my free hand, and he shrieks. Actually shrieks. He also thrashes his legs in a way that’s dangerous. I shrink as far into the back of the couch as I can, trying to avoid his flailing heels.

“Didn’t think that through, did you?” he asks.

“Fuck off.”

He snorts, then twists around and reaches over the arm of the couch. “There’s some in here, I think,” he says, tugging at the age-worn clasp of a carved wooden box. When it doesn’t open right away, he turns all the way round and takes a firmer grip.

I scoot closer to watch.

 _Box_ isn’t a sufficient descriptor. It’s a beautiful ornament from a set of Headmistress Bunce’s family heirlooms, handed down to Penny when she and Simon had moved into the apartment. The sort of thing that’s full of magic simply because it’s been around mages for so many generations.

(So of course Snow and Bunce fill it with vouchers and hair pins and random tiny things any sane person would toss in the bin.)

It’s beautiful, and it’s magickal, and it’s old, so the wood tends to stick, warped from an infinity of changing seasons. Simon tugs at the lid, but the box remains stubbornly closed. Meanwhile, I sit there, my hair still gathered in my hand, still feeling undignified. Huffing a sigh, I lean against his back and hook my chin over his shoulder. “Let me, Snow.”

He swats at my face, and I laugh. With my free hand, I pull my wand from my pocket and point it around his side. Ali Baba and the forty thieves might not consider a hair band treasure, but I want it, and that’s really all that drives the spell.

“ **Open Sesame** ,” I cast, still draped across Simon’s back.

I barely hear the _pop_ of the box coming open over the rushing sound as Simon inhales. His shoulders tense, then he’s shoving backwards to sit upright and pushing me away. Hard.

My discarded book hits the ground with a _thud_.

“Baz,” Simon breathes. His gaze darts to my wand. His hand clenches into a fist.

Oh.

He _felt_ that. And he hasn’t felt anyone’s magic since he fed his own into the Humdrum.

Not until today.

He turns away, and it’s like I can see him retreating, drawing into himself. His pulse speeds up and I can smell the panic on him.

But I don’t smell panic in his magic.

It’s still thin. Still just a thread. Not a thing that’s rising to engulf his entire world, no matter what he fears.

At least not yet.

\--

“Baz.”

“No.”

“But what if —”

“No.”

“We have to tell someone.”

His silent, closed-off reflection had lasted for hours, seeming to fill up the entire flat, to press empty spaces between us, into us. Hours, and this is the only conclusion he’s reached. I want to yell at him. I want to slam my hands down on the kitchen table. I want to shake some sense into his beautiful but idiotic head.

Instead I sit back in my chair, cross my legs, and study my fingernails. (The one on my left pinky is split on the side. I pick at it instead of at Simon.) “No,” I say again. Calm but firm. “We don’t. We have no idea what this means, Simon, and as long as that’s true, _we don’t have to tell anyone._ ”

There’s a litany inside my head, one I’ve been ignoring for days now. Thoughts on repeat: that we’ll never have to tell anyone, that we never _will_ tell anyone, even if it means we have to run and hide in a yurt on some remote mountain somewhere. I can’t trust anyone not to hurt him. I will never, never let anyone hurt him. (My fingernail tears.) But I won’t say that until I have to.

“That’s _why_ we have to tell someone,” he’s saying. “Because what if it means — what if —”

I lean forward to grab his hand and thread my fingers through his. He’s trembling.

“It could start again, Baz. The Humdrum. Me. _I_ could start again.”

“No,” I say. Final.

\--

That night, I dream. I’m standing between Simon and the Coven, between Simon and my family, between Simon and everyone. They won’t leave him alone, won’t let him be, won’t let him _live._ They know the truth now. They’ll _never_ let him live.

I’ve had this dream before, but the other way round. It ends in flames. For both of us.

I wake on a gasp, the horror of it lingering in the grey-dark chill of Simon’s room. Of crossing wands with my father. With Fiona. With my baby sister someday grown.

Simon’s draped across my chest, skin-to-skin, his impossible wings unfurled over us, stretching across the bed. He mutters something into my collarbone, his mouth hot on my cool skin. My scalp stings when he tugs his fingers in my hair. I breathe him in. Sweet. Brown. Smoke. _Simon_.

(Mordelia, tall, her brown hair long and flowing, with fire in her eyes and fear in her heart.)

I close my eyes and try to float away.

\--

We tell Bunce the next day.

Once, sometime last year, Simon’s tail had clumsily slapped an empty glass off the table as we’d wandered through the kitchen. He’d winced at the sound of it shattering on the tile floor and turned back, apology on his lips. He’d found Bunce frozen, staring down at the shards with wide, wide eyes, drawing sharp, uneven breaths.

I don’t know how she remembers glass from the White Chapel when all I can remember is blood.

She looks like that again today. I sit at the table and wait, my hands steepled together. Snow gets up and refills her tea, then leans against the counter.

After long moments, her eyes narrow and her forehead creases, as though Miss Possibelf’s set us a thorny challenge in Magic Words.

“That’s not normal,” she says. Quiet. Breathless.

“Well, it’s certainly not _Normal_ ,” I counter.

\--

Bunce thinks about it for a day, and then for another. She asks annoying, unanswerable questions that I’ve been asking myself since the day I walked in to find Simon sleeping on the living room sofa, smelling peacefully like magic. She twists her fingers and knots up her hair and stares out the window broodily.

I’m a little proud at how much I’m rubbing off on her.

I can tell when she’s made up her mind. She sits in the armchair and looks straight at me. I call Simon in from the kitchen. She takes a deep breath and launches in.

She tells us we should run. That we should run _now_. That we should be nowhere anyone can find us while we figure out what’s happening. What this means. We can puzzle it out like we did my mother’s murder, she says, like she and Simon had done time and time again.

I knew she would. Simon had told me what she’d said after I’d left them on Christmas Day. That she’d been willing to leave everything, to hide him, to take him away where no one could find him or touch him.  

She doesn’t love him more than I do. Not now. Not today. But maybe in that one moment, when I was consumed by my mother’s murder and my own fiery crisis of faith, she did.

She was wrong then, as it turned out. She’s wrong now, too. It’s not time to go, not yet.

We stay, because I don’t want to do anything unusual. I don’t want to draw attention. I don’t want anyone noticing.

We stay, and I plan.

\--

I stay. At his flat, in his bed, by his side whenever I can be. Two weeks ago I’d stayed at Fiona’s. I’d had exams, and Simon’s distracting. (He’s distracting on purpose.) (Not that I mind.) He’d called me a swot and kissed me out the door and annoyed me all day with the buzz from texts full of heart-eye emojis.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those were the last nights I’ll ever spend away from him.

I’m never leaving.

His magic grows and rises. Even Bunce can feel it now. It’s not out of control, it’s not panicked, but it feels … insecure. Lost. Like it’s looking for something.

He refuses to use it. I can’t decide if that’s for the best.

He’s still quiet during the day. He spends more time with his school books, but the pages turn slower than usual. He wakes early and cooks breakfast and won’t answer Bunce’s questions about what’s going on in his head.

At night, though, when he’s alone with me in the dark, he’s fierce, pressing against me, kissing me harder and longer and leaving me breathless. His fingers dig into my flesh and his groans are hot and loud against my ear. He’s alive, in that way only Simon Snow can be.

The way he’s been teaching me.

Simon has dreams, too. Nightmares like he hasn’t in months, like he did after the White Chapel, after Watford, after the Mage and the Humdrum and Hampshire and _me_.

I don’t know which of us has them more.

“You shouldn’t stay,” he says to Bunce and me as we sit in the kitchen late one night. “You shouldn’t be so close. You should both just _go_.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Bunce retorts.

“You’re right,” he says. “You’re right. That is stupid. _I_ should go.”

I tighten my hands around my teacup.

In all the time we’ve been together, Simon’s never been afraid to sleep next to me. Not when I’m tired or when I’m thirsty or when I’m angry and a complete bastard. Not after the Humdrum pushed his nothing inside me and I was made only of hot raging _need._ Not after I told him it was the Mage who’d murdered my mother and shut me up in the dark for six weeks plus forever.

Not after he’d given up his magic and wouldn’t let anyone else touch him for the longest time. Just Bunce. Just _me_.

I’m not going to be afraid of him now. If Bunce’s crystal ball told us that Simon would wake up in the middle of the night and devour all the magic in London, would eat up all of England, would consume me whole (he’s already consumed me whole), I still wouldn’t leave.

“Simon,” Bunce says. Her voice is soft, studied, calm.

I shove back my chair and stand up from the table. “Come to bed, Snow.”

\--

I can tell he’s ready to bolt. Thinks he’s a time bomb, believes he’ll be making some kind of brave, self-sacrificing choice if he runs away from the people he cares about.

But I’m still planning.

When I turned 16, Fiona made sure I knew how to disappear, in case the Mage or the Coven ever found out about me. (She never said that was why, of course.) So I’ve got safe deposit boxes with fake IDs and cash. I know how to get out of England without the Coven noticing. I speak fluent French, and I can get by in German or Spanish or even Russian.

I’d added new identities for Simon after he destroyed the Humdrum, before I even went back to Watford. I even stashed one for Bunce. No one knew what was going to happen next, and I wasn’t taking any chances. (I’m like a dead, blood-sucking spy movie.)

Now, my plans unfold like stories in my mind.

The first step is the simplest. I’ll take Simon, and we’ll slip over to the other side of the channel. We can lose ourselves in Paris. Buy new phones, get new emails, piece together new lives. Bunce is smart with technology (she’s smart with everything), and we’ve talked, she and I. Someone needs to stay. Someone who can tell us if they’re looking for us, where they’re looking for us, when they’ve found us.

When we have to run again.

There’s something seductive about it, knowing it would be just him and me against the wide world. Living in some awful flat, working menial jobs, worrying and wondering as we held each other up and tried not to tear each other apart. We’d go to sleep tangled together and wake up tangled in our sheets. I’d teach him to speak French. He’d teach me to let the winds of fortune take us where they would.

I make him promise not to leave London, not to go to the Coven, not to do anything without me. I make him swear it, and I seal it with my magic, and I watch him stare at our joined hands in mingled wonder and terror.

I’ll help him find the courage to use his magic again.

\--

We spend weeks on the precipice, staring out at the uncertain future. Then we get thrust off the cliff, and as usual, it’s nothing I’ve prepared for.

(Fiona would say that _this_ is how I got kidnapped by numpties.) (She might be right.)

Bunce brings in the post one afternoon, frowning over a card with an American stamp.

“Trouble in paradise?” I inquire.

“It’s not from Micah,” she says, unruffled. “And it’s not for me.” She holds it out to Snow.

He raises his eyebrows, shrugs, and tears open the envelope. He barely looks at the front of the card he pulls out before unfolding it. A photo slips free, and he catches it as he reads the card’s handwritten message.

Then he looks at the picture in his hand and flinches, dropping it.

My eyes catch the image from the side as it falls, and my hand darts out to pluck it from the floor.

“What the fuck, Agatha?” Simon mutters, shaking his hand as if it burns.

I feel like mine is burning, too, like the forest lit all around me. That’s the Mage. A young, _stupid_ looking Mage. (It’s not fire burning me, it’s hate.)

I force myself to look away, to see the rest of the picture, the young women sitting nearby. One is clearly Headmistress Bunce, younger even than Penny is now. And the other is —

Her eyes are wide and blue. Common, boring blue. _Unremarkable_.

I stare at her face for so long that Bunce comes to look over my shoulder.

“Oh,” she breathes. “ _Oh_.”

I’ve been called dramatic before. Snow says it on a regular basis, complains he’s stuck living in some teen vampire novel and could I please tone it down. (Which is hilarious considering he’s the one with the impulse control of a toddler.) But I think I’m being objective when I say that _oh_ seems to shade a bit toward understatement.

Bunce sucks in another breath. “That’s my mother’s friend from school,” she says, the words tumbling over each other in her rush. “She … she ran away. To America. That’s what everyone says.”

“Did she?” I ask.

Bunce is silent. Simon looks at us like we’re speaking French that I haven’t taught him yet, but he leans into me and squints down at the picture again.

I swear his magic _sharpens,_ fizzing into focus.

“Who is she?” I probe. “Who’s her family?”

“I don’t know,” Bunce answers. “I never asked. I don’t think Mum ever said.”

I shove the photo at her. “Find out.”

\--

Bunce comes back with a name and a report that she thinks she’s kicked over an anthill.

“Have you never actually _looked_ at Simon?” she’d asked her mother. Bunce mimes her mother’s wide-eyed response by rounding her hands around her glasses.

“She ran off to the attic after that,” Bunce says now. “To look for her old school things. Dad hid in his study. He said they’d call later.”

Could any of this be that insultingly simple? That Simon hadn’t been some strange, wild magic born into a Normal baby, that he wasn’t birthed of some dark summoning forced into body that was never meant to be anything but mundane? That instead he was just … a child?

Someone’s child, made into an instrument of war. Like the Mage’s men. Like Bunce’s brother. Like me.

\--

Simon’s holding his wand in both hands, looking down at it. “He said it was his father’s.”

“Apparently not,” I reply.

“So why didn’t it ever work right?”

I shrug. “Didn’t like all that illicitly-acquired magic you were carrying around?”

We went to the Bunces’ house yesterday so Simon could see Penny’s father. To ask how magic healed itself. In the dead spots. Maybe in a person. To find out what was possible.

Out of all the things I’ve ever seen Simon dare, I think that conversation was the most courageous.

Headmistress Bunce, confronted with a reality she’d somehow failed to see, had pulled down box after box from their attic, digging through old papers and albums. When she’d finally found the stack of photos she’d been seeking, the truth had been right there in the very first one. Right there in Lucy’s hand.

I have to wonder if an entire generation of mages had simply gone mad when Simon and his magic burst into the world the first time. Or maybe it happened when a murdering maniac let dark creatures breach the sacred bounds of Watford.

My mother had died, and I’d been Turned, and they’d all completely lost their minds.

What else explains not seeing Lucy Salisbury right there in Simon’s face? Or not noticing that the wand he’d been given by the Mage was the same one she’d carried all those years before at Watford?

I’ve tried to imagine a world where Bunce disappears, and an unclaimed child turns up a decade later with her eyes and her face and her ugly purple ring. Simon Snow would tear that world apart trying to find out what happened. ( _I’d_ tear that world apart. Unsolved mysteries irritate me.)

“Who’s going to tell Ruth?” Bunce’s father had asked, irrelevantly. As if Lady Salisbury were the big problem here. Or any problem at all.

We don’t know what happened to Lucy. And with the Mage gone, we probably never will.

“Nobody,” I’d answered. “Not right now. Not till Snow’s ready.”

He’s definitely not ready yet. He doesn’t need an instant (and probably reluctant) grandmother when he’s still staring in wonder at his wand. At _his mother’s_ wand.

Magickal artefacts are strange by definition. Maybe her wand had hated the part of him that belonged to the Mage. Or maybe it didn’t approve simply because Simon hadn’t known Lucy existed.

He looks up.

“I’d just got used to being Normal,” he says.

“As if you could ever be Normal,” I retort. I try to sneer, but there’s a glint in his eyes I’ve never seen before and it’s fucking captivating. It’s hard to be aloof when I can see him reinventing his world right in front of me.

\--

“So,” Bunce says to me, “you’re staying, then?”

She doesn’t mean just for the night. I make a face, but I nod. It’s pointless to affect nonchalance. Bunce knows exactly what I’d do for Simon, what I’d give up. We’d planned it down to burner phones and secure emails and lists of false names. It’s humiliating and a relief at the same time.

(Anyway, I already decided I wasn’t leaving.)

She shrugs back. “Less rent for me.”

I don’t answer, and she doesn’t look like she expects one. After a moment of blank silence, we turn away. She heads for the kitchen, and I walk slowly towards Simon’s room.

Our room now, I suppose. That ought to take getting used to, but somehow it doesn’t. It just feels like what the universe expects.

I hesitate in the doorway, nudging the door further open. Simon’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking down at a wooden box in front of him. It’s the twin of the one in the living room, or perhaps an older sibling. A little larger, but the same shape, the same worn carvings, the same patina of age on the hinges and the clasp. He’s not touching it yet. He’s staring down at it like it contains all the hidden secrets of the universe.

And maybe it does. Headmistress Bunce had given it to him yesterday as we were walking out of the house. “We used to write,” she’d said, “Lucy and I. Over the holidays. Just silly, teenage girl nonsense. Not much, really.”

It was more than he’d ever had.

He tips his head a bit to the side, and then he’s sitting up and squaring his shoulders. He’s holding his wand, and I’m holding my breath.

“ **Open Sesame**.”

There’s a click as the latch pops free, accompanied by a whiff of green smoke. Nothing sparks. The windows don’t shatter. The Humdrum doesn’t show up and start demanding payment.

His shoulders relax, and I exhale.

I cross the threshold and push the door closed behind me.

.

_Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,_  
_And here on earth come emulating flies,_  
_That though they never equal stars in size,_  
_(And they were never really stars at heart)_  
_Achieve at times a very star-like start.  
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part._

Robert Frost, _Fireflies in the Garden_

 

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr at [tulipsandtesseracts](http://tulipsandtesseracts.tumblr.com)


End file.
